


A quiet sort of rage

by LostinFic



Category: Broadchurch, Secret Diary of a Call Girl (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Sex, F/M, Ficlet, Infidelity, One Shot, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Teninch Fic, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 11:06:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4476983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostinFic/pseuds/LostinFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wants him for the aesthetic of it alone. For his hair in her clutch. For kiss-swollen lips and doleful eyes. She wants to gorge on his anger and sadness. Fill herself with it. She wants to objectify him. But then she wants him to caress her hair and hold her close, with all his tranquil strength so she doesn’t shatter. It’s pathetic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A quiet sort of rage

**Author's Note:**

> Because sometimes I like them messed up and unbound.
> 
> Set after the series finale of both shows.

“I hope you’re throwing me an embarrassingly lavish party,” Peter says on the morning of his fortieth birthday.

Hannah turns to her boyfriend with a mischievous smile: “Maybe… just don’t come back home before 8, okay?”

The party is a success. The birthday boy is duly surprised and the hors d’oeuvre are delicious. Peter keeps an arm around her waist. He’s happy and she’s happy for him.

As she scans the crowded living room, she tries to reap some domestic satisfaction out of it. Perhaps with another martini…

One guest is missing— maybe more than one, but this one she notices: Alec Hardy. He’s an old mate of Peter’s. They’re the kind of friends who don’t have anything in common anymore but are bound together by memories and nostalgia. She’s learned all about their teenage boy antics.

Somewhere along the way Hannah became his friend too. Not enough to see each other without her boyfriend there, but enough that there’s no awkwardness when they’re left together in a room. The very opposite of awkwardness in fact, as he sometimes waits until Peter has left to tell Hannah something. And maybe once or twice they hugged when they were alone (he needed it).

She’s not surprised Hardy isn’t at the party. He wouldn’t know half the people here, and dislikes the other half. She toys with her phone, considers calling to guilt him into coming. Peter would like to see him. Then there’s a knock at the door and she’s smiling and kissing his scruffy cheek.

“I asked for help this time,” he says, handing her a bottle of wine.

She takes a closer look at the label, better safe than sorry considering the plonk he brought over last time. He waits for her approval.

“Excellent choice.”

She kisses his cheek again. Looping her arm through his, she introduces him to other guests like the achieved hostess that she is.

People who haven’t seen him in years ask how he’s been. They ask with a sympathetic head tilt that tells him they have a vague idea of what he’s been through. Some tragic backstory clings to his clothes, skews his tie. But he refuses to trade sordid details for attention, and she respects him for it. When he clams up in answer to their questions, they shake their heads fondly as if to say he hasn’t changed. “Hardy, who knows what’s going on in his head?”

She leaves him on his own after a while. She keeps an eye on him, and so does he, exchanging glances across the room.

An illicit thrill dances along her breast bone. It’s been so long since she’s sabotaged her own happiness.

He’s her type in an unglamorous way. Not a Hollywood actor crush, something hushed and nestled, an Autumn fantasy. She usually likes her men clean-cut and confident, arm candy even, like Peter. Hardy’s charm runs deeper, more hum than pizazz. And maybe you have to squint to see it, but it’s there in the hollow of his hands, the narrowness of his nose, the jutting of his bottom lip. It’s in his subdued good manners and in his rudeness.

He’s always nice to her even if it took her a while to realize it (she used to think he hated her). He doesn’t make a show of being kind.

She’d like to know what it’s like to kiss him.

But she can’t think about it too much, she’ll be faithful this time. She can’t afford to fall for someone so broken. Peter is her second chance (or third or fourth), he’s healthy and mature, he’s what she needs. Anyway, Hardy’s not over his ex-wife. Or so he claims. He needs a goal, he has a one-track mind, he thrives on obsession. He’ll win her back, he says. Yet, she’s had enough experience with men to know when she’s desired. And maybe it’s best that they’ve never seen each other without Peter there.

The elegant fête dissolves into an adolescent party. Expensive whisky is mixed with cheap soda.

It’s a drifting sort of drunkenness that makes her follow him. They find themselves alone in the kitchen. It’s what he wanted. He’s not his usual careful self. He’s fishing for trouble with a look that coaxes her legs open. Not smoldering but wistful.

“You look beautiful tonight.”

“Don’t,” she begs as she presses her nose to the crook of his neck.

His hands rest chastely on her knees.

She wishes he weren’t so polite. He could gather her skirt in his fist, slip his hand where it throbs, here in the kitchen, with all the guests in the other room. She’d come in a flash. She’s a thrill-seeker, a tightrope walker. But she can’t afford it anymore— emotionally, that is.

She walks away. She warps her disappointment into virtue. She’s high on self-righteousness when she finds Peter and kisses the breath out of him. Someone has to extinguish this fire.

Later that night, Hardy learns of her past career when her boyfriend brags about it to a few mates gathered in the billiard room. Peter goes on and on about her bedroom skills, spinning it all in his favour, unaware that she’s listening from the hallway. But Hardy catches her eyes, and when she walks away, he comes after her.

“I’m not ashamed of it,” she flats out declares when he walks out on the terrace where she’s taken refuge.

“… Okay.”

“But when people hear that, they think I was turning ticks on a street corner. But I was high-class, expensive. I was good at my job. Men paid to take me on their private jets to tropical islands. People don’t know…”

Her voice is suddenly weak, drained.

She’s tired of people taking a part of her and shaping it into something that makes them feel superior. Whether to boast to their mates or to be comforted in their boring life choices. She’s tired of being chipped away by sculptors who aren’t herself. Chiselled until she’s nothing but empty beautiful skin. Flakes of flesh and smile and spirit have fallen off her over the years as she constantly changed shape to please clients, boyfriends and family.

She’d come to resent the very thing she’d first loved about her job, exhausted as she was from running away from herself.

She thought it would be different with Peter. It had been until now. He wasn’t enough to quell her loneliness but she’d thought she could trust him.

Hardy sits down next to her, their feet dangling off the edge of the balcony. His hand hesitates on the nape of her neck.

She rests her head on his shoulder, and she likes the way he straightens his back to better support it. He doesn’t say a word. She cherishes his quietness, his stillness.

She thinks they could be lovers. He’d be grateful, undemanding, gentle.

He’s seen the worst end of humanity, maybe he won’t think her so terrible.

She looks at his hand and imagines the span of his fingers cradling her lower back as she cants her hips to meet his. She would lick every freckle off his skin. They would be beautiful and silent, yielding marble. They would be Rodin’s _Kiss_ , _Cupid and Psyche_ , _The Rape of Proserpina;_ languid kisses and fingers boring into flesh, a quiet sort of violence. Timeless. No cause and effect.

She wants him for the aesthetic of it alone. For his hair in her clutch. For kiss-swollen lips and doleful eyes.

She wants to gorge on his anger and sadness. Fill herself with it.

She wants to laugh in the face of his efforts to make her come, she wants to be unsated, and teach him until she’s crying in pleasure. Tear him apart and rebuild him to her satisfaction. She wants to objectify him.

But then she wants him to caress her hair and hold her close, with all his tranquil strength so she doesn’t shatter. It’s pathetic.

She’s never had to convince a man to fuck her before.

“What about Peter?”

“It’s not about him.”

“You know I want to get back together with Tess,” he warns.

Perfect, he won’t fall in love with her.

“I’ll make you a better lover for her,” she counters.

He hesitates, and she likes him for it. She used to think that doing the right thing was overrated.

But she can taste his loneliness, his desperation, like a peach too ripe, fermenting at the foot of its tree. A life spoiled.

He knows they’re kindred spirits, caught in the limbo between their former and future selves. She’ll hold his hand and he’ll guide her through the fog.

She takes him to her house, and undresses him. Shedding the shirt and tie that make him who he is.

She appraises his body. She admires the shadows under his eyes, the sharp edge of his protruding hipbones and ribcage, the sinuous strength of his arms. She appreciates the smoothness of it all under her palms, under her nails. She adores the ridge of his scars and the signs of aging.

He hides his uneasiness behind indignant huffs and a quirked eyebrow.

She indulges his impatience, lets him undress her with a slight tremor in his hands and his cock growing beautifully. She kisses him with her eyes open to see his eyelids flutter shut.

Leaning against the dresser, not quite sitting on it, she guides his hand between her legs. She fucks herself on his long fingers.

There’s an art to detachment. She rejoices in her own coolness as she rocks against his hand, coating his palm in her juices. Ice queen, glacier water running out of her.

But then she looks at his face and sees the look in his eyes, not quite pity exactly, but something caring that makes her heart clench. And she notices his supporting grip on her waist. When her movements still, he takes over, fingers moving in and out of her with a squelching noise and the heel of his hand grinding against her clit. His mouth is at her throat, hot on her skin, just shy of biting. He’s no longer passive. It’s not what she wanted but she never knows what she wants. Her head falls to his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut. It’s not so much a moan as a long vibration in her throat that betrays her pleasure. And when her legs give out he catches her.

She has half-a-mind to let him stew in his own arousal. Just to prove a point, for a vague feeling of being powerful. Does power lay in controlling others or in taking what she wants? Does it matter when she’s already pushing him on the bed and straddling his hips?

He’s staring at her, arms crossed behind his head, as she teases his cock. He too can play it cool.

She wants to find his tipping point, test how far she can take this before he’s had enough of her. Before he leaves like everyone else.

But he beats her at her own game.

She feels the rasp of his knuckles against her inner thigh as he strokes himself. She sits back on her heels and stares openly at the smooth flourish of his wrist. She relishes the voyeurism but resents that he doesn’t need her.

If he closed his eyes, would he think of her?

So she watches him watching her. Once again, she exists in the eye of the beholder. She hates it but doesn’t know better. Until he kisses her. Then she exists in his breath.

She’s sinking down on him before she even knows she’s doing it.

They can’t stop kissing. It’s selfishness and devotion.

She’s still hollow but marginally less so. And there they are, his hands digging in her flesh, grappling for purchase on her body. He’s sinking too. And she’s not so alone.

She seeks his eyes, but he doesn’t see her, blinded by pleasure. He doesn’t see her but she still exists. He bites her neck and she feels alive at the blood rushing under her skin.

She bucks her hips erratically, panting against his cheek, his stubble scratching her lips raw.

He’s doing most of the work now.

She revels in the way he disappears in her, in the smell of sweat, in the obscene noises of their bodies meeting.

There’s no beauty to it anymore.

And she comes with her whole body curling like a wave. And he shouts, truly breaking the silence for the first time.

His semen runs down her thighs. She dips her fingers in it, loving the mess— doesn’t that just sum up her life?

Carefully, he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, fingertips coming to rest on her jaw.

“Hannah…”

He shouldn’t have said her name, not like this, not so gently and concerned. She hates him for it and she loves him for it. She wants him to leave but she wants him to stay. And then he’s holding her.

She presses her nose to his chest, seeing nothing but his skin, focusing on the pattern of his freckles.

In the wee hours, she waits for regret and guilt to come. She’s so used to it by now, it barely registers yet she forces herself to feel it.

She looks at Hardy’s sleeping form and it seems last night hasn’t quenched her frenzy. She slips a hand under the bed sheet where he’s unconsciously hard. He groans and his eyes open laboriously as he arches into her fist. As soon as he’s fully awake, she’s over him.

“I feel used,” he says.

“I am using you.”

At least, it makes him laugh.

She guides his cock to her folds, takes in every inch and rolls her head back.

With a forceful hand on the nape of her neck, he brings her mouth to his. He flips them over and drives into her. Who’s using who, now? Her laughter is wet. She rakes his back.

“Let’s ruin each other.”

He stops, frightened by their passion. She spits back his apology.

She turns her back to him and he’s in her again. He grips her hip and moves slowly. His thrusts are hypnotic. His kisses are opiates.

The heartbeat in his chest against her back becomes her measure of time.

“It’s all-encompassing,” he says.

Pleasure courses sluggishly through their veins leading to calm orgasms. And they fall asleep intertwined.

Rising sun catches in her eyelashes. She thinks about the pieces of her that have been chipped away, those she’s been slowly getting back, cradling them in her arms, close to her chest, safe and away from others. She’s been holding onto them so tightly, she’s crushing them to dust. She wants to dump it all in Hardy’s arms “you keep them, I can’t be trusted with myself.” Every last piece of her, he can have.

 

 


End file.
